The Fig Tree - Lalita Sarjana

My backyard was home to a ginormous fig tree. The kind that’s there before you were born. Every year it blossomed and my family indulged in the sweet flesh of ripening figs. 

When I had just started high school, and I chose between friends and clubs as if they were something you could limit, I came home and was given a new chore; cleaning up the fallen figs. There was something interestingly upsetting about washing them away — Knowing the saccharine fruit would never meet its purpose of exposing a tongue to taste or a body to nutrition, knowing the seeds it released would never sprout, and would instead end up being washed into the old garden where they will have nothing else to do except decay. It was only nature, though. Not every fig will survive. After all, you can’t try them all. 

A few years later, I was older, and school was coming to an end. I sat in my backyard, staring at a screen, deciding which university to go to. What to major in. Which city I’ll thrive in. I could go to an expensive film school across the country, or fashion school in the big city. I could study 

law in a cold city far far away, or I could learn how the human mind works. The options were endless. To pick only one, knowing that meant the others would never be mine, was the equivalent of picking what toy to get at the store when I was a child. I ate figs as I worked, occasionally wincing when I picked an overly tart one. That night I sat there for hours, picking figs and my future. 

The next time I came home, I was alone, with a job that brought me more money than it did happiness. The fig tree was more than ancient. It produced less figs as time went on, and even then, you’d have to be careful which ones you ate, not all of them were still sweet. At the bottom of the fig tree was an overwhelming amount of decaying fruit. Some seemed to have bite marks taken out of them. Perhaps if I had looked closer, I would’ve found the X on the grass, marking the buried time capsule I had once filled with everything I loved. Self drawn clothing designs, pieces of poetry I would've never dared to write now, copies of my favourite books, strings to my old guitar, recipes to my favourite homemade dishes. I didn’t look closely though, did I ? I simply sighed as the hose turned on, slowly washing away the dead fruits, the marked X leaving with it. 

I had let my figs rot.